Bonnie Jo Campbell knows rural Michigan right down to the vertical pupils of the massasauga rattlesnake. For almost 25 years, in her celebrated novels and story collections, she’s been charting streams and hauling logs to construct her own space in the literature of Midwestern gothic. She focuses on a realm largely written off, ignored or shellacked in national mythology, a world of hardscrabble farmers and laborers stumbling around in the long shadow of America’s collapsed manufacturing economy.
That sounds grim, but there’s an indomitable spirit pushing back against despair in Campbell’s work. I’ve been looking forward to a new novel from her since 2011, when she published “Once Upon a River,” the unforgettable tale of a young woman who lights off on her own to escape a rising tide of family violence.
Review
“The Waters”
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
W.W. Norton. 383 pages.
$30
Campbell attends to people forced to slog through the muck of crushed hopes. Even when her women are subjected to betrayal and sexual abuse, they are not without power of their own. And yet, even when they’re heroines, they are not immaculately endowed with feminist insights. Each must, instead, construct the leaky vessel of her life from scratch.
All of Campbell’s abiding concerns swirl through “The Waters,” her first novel in a dozen years. It’s a family epic that wanders along a serpentine river’s bank and sinks deep into a swamp outside Whiteheart, Michigan. Old Hermine Zook – so commanding that she’s known as “Herself” – lives in a cottage on an island accessible only by a wooden bridge that floats on discarded oil barrels. The edges of her swamp kingdom are marked with signs of “menacing skulls” and “piles of bones.” She’s been holed up there, harvesting staghorn sumac, white snakeroot, blackberries, hemlock and other plants to mix tonics, salves and medicines. The local minister disparages Herself’s work – particularly her willingness to help young women with unwanted pregnancies. Depending on whether they’re in pain, folks in Whiteheart regard her as a doctor or a witch. “It is said,” Campbell writes, “the island, where healing waters percolate to the surface, was a place where women shared one another’s dreams, a place where women did what they wanted.”
A light touch of fantasy runs through this story, starting with its opening phrase, “Once upon a time.” But we’re not talking about the magical elements of, say, Alice Hoffman’s novels. For Campbell, the dose of pixie dust is thoroughly diluted in a stream of gritty reality; her style never leaves the loamy land behind. Indeed, the combination of mystical allusions and sexual assault in these chapters is a reminder of the freaky nature of fairy tales before they were neutered and sanitized. If there’s an enchanted cast to this place, it’s more a trick of the light, a projection of Herself’s aura. So removed and isolated does her island feel that it’s always a bit of a shock when some townie shoulders in and reminds us of the world of antibiotics and public schools and financial regulations that persists just outside its borders.
As the novel opens, we learn that Herself raised three daughters, who have all grown up and left her. That family drama is much discussed by the farmers and handymen of Whiteheart. Serving as an enflanneled Greek chorus, they gather at night after leaving the Muck Rattler bar to stare out at Herself’s cabin and speculate in a volley of quips, cracks and down-home predictions. Sometimes, still a little drunk, they shoot at the island, imagining they might hit a snake.
If these men share any romantic hopes in common, they’re pinned on the relationship between Titus Jr. and Herself’s youngest daughter, Rose Thorn. Titus is everybody’s best friend, the town’s Prince Charming. “Everything made more sense when Titus was with them,” Campbell writes. “He always had the right joke, the right Bible reference, the right comment about a man digging a hole.” And Rose, his childhood sweetheart, “was known for being lovely enough that when you saw her, you felt a reprieve from whatever had been troubling you.”
Titus and Rose were set to marry as soon as she turned 18, but their plans were scuttled when Rose began acting erratically, even self-destructively, and then ran off to her older sister in California. That’s Rose for you: way too pretty and a little crazy – not that anything could ever change Titus’s heart.
Like any community with its own secret histories and unspoken customs, this is a difficult novel to enter, and Campbell makes no concessions. She immediately peoples her pages with a large cast of eccentric characters and a thick backstory so casually laced with shocking violence that it’s tempting to think you must have misheard. But don’t be quick to drive by Whiteheart. You must succumb to the pace of “The Waters.” Once you get thoroughly sunk into the story, you’ll resent ever having to leave this matriarchal family that insists on preserving its own peculiar ways in a world determined to move on.
The action takes off when Rose returns home – with a baby not fathered by Titus. Too depressed to care for the child, Rose passes that duty off to Herself, who keeps the baby alive by feeding her donkey milk. Over the years, while Rose vanishes and reappears as the spirit moves her, her daughter, nicknamed Donkey, grows into a precocious sprite who knows nothing of school or shopping malls but everything about snakes and wild herbs. She’s Miranda to Herself’s Prospero.
When her mother moves back home again and promises never to leave, Donkey and Titus imagine they might finally be able to keep this dazzling woman settled and happy. Besides, the whole town needs Rose to stay this time. Every Saturday evening, she holds court at a fire pit near a giant willow tree across the water from Herself’s cabin. Finally done with work, musky men and their wives and girlfriends gather to listen to music and tell tall tales. “It was time for a new marriage and this new kind of healing,” writes Campbell. “People were here to be part of a compelling story, and at the center of that story was Titus gazing at Rose Thorn across the fire or arguing theatrically with her. In a town where men and women were shy, where they relied on TV love or movie love or pop-song love, they watched Rose Thorn and Titus hungrily, emulated them. With the two of them together again, the hard-working citizens of Whiteheart were beginning to feel they, themselves, might have a chance at a great love.”
It subtracts nothing from Campbell’s originality to suggest that she’s taken up the mantle of John Irving. Like the elder novelist, Campbell explores mysteries of paternity (and maternity) with tremendous sympathy. Her mingling of comedy, sex and calamity – without diminishing their distinct impacts – serves as a kind of feminist counterpoint to Irving’s priapic stories. And fans of both novelists will notice their similarly thoughtful consideration of abortion, their use of animals and even a missing hand.
But Campbell is less encumbered than Irving by the autobiographical impulse. She moves deftly and sympathetically from character to character and from family out to community. And for a novel so devoted to an island of wise women, she’s equally insightful about the unbearable sorrow of unappreciated men. Even while fully acknowledging the long scar of rape and mocking the masculine tendency toward self-pity, Campbell can hear the plaintive desperation of guys who know that their livelihoods, their prowess and their time are fading.
Young Donkey must somehow negotiate this fragmented world in which rattlesnakes are hardly the worst threat. Is there any way to carry on her grandmother’s naturalist work and save her radiant mother from self-destruction? Campbell’s most astonishing feat is bringing “The Waters” to a climax that abandons the fantasy of her “once upon a time” opening and yet eventually delivers us to a place of real magic we never could have anticipated.
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